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Many years ago, I said to a colleague, “What a beautiful shirt! Royal blue is a good color on you.” She replied, “What do you mean blue? This shirt is purple!” After some experimenting, we discovered that we consistently differed on the line between blue and purple. In extending our experiments to co-workers, we found that I was the outlier—most people saw blue and purple more like my colleague. It turns out that such differences are real; the proteins that detect light in our eyes can be tuned to slightly different wavelengths, and we can each have slightly different ratios of the three proteins that allow us to distinguish colors. I really do see blue where most people see purple. (Do you? Here’s a Buzzfeed quiz.)

The National Center for Science Education works to ensure that every student gets the science education they need to become informed and engaged citizens when they grow up. We help teachers cover evolution and climate change accurately and completely, especially in communities where the topics are highly contentious. Our Science Booster Clubs provide community members with an easy way to bring fun and accessible hands-on evolution and climate change activities to public events. We vigilantly monitor any interference in the integrity of science education.

The occasion was the 2017 awards luncheon of the California Science Teachers Association (CSTA). The National Center for Science Education was being honored with the 2017 Distinguished Contributions Award, for our work supporting the California Science Framework review process, and our help in providing teachers with guidance about how to respond to the Heartland Institute’s mailing of misleading climate propaganda to California teachers. It was awfully nice of CSTA to recognize NCSE since in my view, it’s teachers who deserve the accolades.

On May 19, 2017, a little more than two years after I started building what would become the Science Booster Club program here in Iowa, I participated in my last local event. At the Iowa City Public Library’s STEAM fest, we interacted with around two thousand people on the topic of climate change.

What could be better than three Science Booster Clubs reaching 80,000 Iowans in two years? How about twelve new Science Booster Clubs reaching hundreds of thousands of people in eight additional states in 2017? That’s our goal for the year, and we are happy to announce that Claire Adrian-Tucci is going to be helping to make it happen.

The Heartland Institute’s recent stunt of mailing unsolicited packets of propaganda to thousands of teachers across the nation continues to win further bad publicity for the climate-change-denying think tank. (Self-inflicted damage is something of a Heartland specialty: remember its 2013 billboard comparing “believers” in global warming to the Unabomber? As the Los Angeles Times (May 9, 2012) noted, it cost Heartland the support not only of allies who reject the scientific consensus on climate change but also of a number of wealthy corporate sponsors.) But Schadenfreude isn’t the only consequence. The stunt also seems to have invigorated a lot of educators, scientists, parents, environmentalists, and even legislators to speak up and speak out on the need to support climate education.

The Heartland Institute is trying to fool teachers. NCSE is fighting back. You can help us.

For over a decade, NCSE has run an annual rafting trip down Grand Canyon as a counterpoint to the numerous creationist rafting trips that use Grand Canyon as a showcase for what they claim as the “evidences” of Noah’s Flood. Our NCSE trip presents the real science of the Canyon while addressing why the claims of creationists simply do not match what we see in the rocks.